I’ve Been Rooney’ed...Again

remixes, cultural daydreams, meaningless meditations

I’ve been Rooney’ed, again—sucked into another television adaptation of Sally Rooney’s mega-popular books, which, for me, means cue the mini-emotional breakdown. Conversations with Friends just dropped on Hulu and nearly seven episodes in, I’ve already talk-cried about it more times than I care to admit. All of this weepy craziness started with Normal People, the ultimate romantic psychological drama that aired a month into the pandemic when I was chiefly running on strange bean varieties and existential dread. Just watching any episode of Connell and Marianne—witnessing their quiet connection and how freely they behaved on a mattress together—was like mainlining grief and hope all at the same time. I blame beautiful Ireland, and Elliott Smith at the credits too, and “Only You” by Yazoo, and the coming-of-age love hangover I was still nursing from Call Me by Your Name mania.

Snapshots of relationships in a bubble, when done well, like Call Me by Your Name and the two Rooney interpretations, do more than just reshuffle the chemistry of my emotions, I get stuck in them—these gorgeously filmed melodramas, filled with talking, and not talking, and amazing soundtracks that slurp-up whatever resolve I had not to bawl myself to sleep. If I were forced to pinpoint the feeling, the way these shows hit my brain, it’s infatuation. Like first love, wrecking everything. But maybe it’s more than that, maybe it’s the way these stories are set up, the shattering build-up to a gut-wrenching and ambiguous finale. Devouring Normal People at the start of the pandemic, when life before was the shattering build-up that was leading us to the gut-wrenching and ambiguous finale (at least that’s how this shit was unfolding in my head), was probably ill-advised. I was not emotionally prepared to watch two young people grow into their adult selves, kiss deeply, fall in love, turn cool, turn uncool, fuck regularly, bike the Italian countryside, date other people and drift off into their vague futures. But now here I am, doing it all over again with its deep-kissing cousin Conversations with Friends, and it’s torture, as infatuation often is.